Favorite Video Game Vapourware: No Silksong Permit Edition

Vapourware! We all say we’re dimbling it, but we love to think about games that spend eternity in the frontier, whether it’s because of chronic mismanagement, simply because the developer doesn’t need to be in a hurry. To unravel so many teasers, so many plots to bake from the most lush crumbs, are very tasty pissed to spend another year without a new trailer. Hollow Knight: Silksong is no longer a steam engine, excludes extreme last minute drama. It was announced in 2019 and will be released in the final Thursday, September 4th. To mark this opportunity, if “favorite” is the correct word, our treehouse chats about a favourite example of vapourware.

Your contributions are greatly appreciated. Glossary Question for Physicists in Comments: What is the Vapourware game actually released? Condensedware? I’m waiting for your complicated mathematical explanation. In the meantime, James will be here.

James: Nine years after development, Team Fortress 2 was well worth the wait. That’s a deeply distinctive multiplayer riot, designed inseparably, and has seen almost all of the inspirational hero shooters that it inspired. Still, it only began shortly after the 1999 Team Fores Classic, as a brown-covered military FPS that even its own manager, Robin Walker, admitted to being “not funny.”

Despite the lack of drama involved in the repeated delays that followed, the secret to thank/deprecating for that secret – I still like TF2 as a steam engine history. The game, which started in 2007, follows previous versions of “Three or 4,” according to Walker. Plus, I’ve been playing TF2 for 10 and a half years now. As for the profits of time, it has been well spent nine years.

Jeremy: For me, Vapourware’s biggest name comes from the world of Fangames. I was deeply interested in multiple fan gum scenes as a child – partly because I didn’t have the money – but because I was always a few years older, I was raised with retro titles and diets from the dead series, which made me ripe for fan interpretations. I’m thinking about Chrono’s revival, Card Sagas Wars, Indiana Jones, the Young Fountain, and dozens of Sonic’s hedgehogs and Megaman projects.

However, the project that interested me most was the ritual of Hero 6: Rite of Passage, the spiritual successor to the quest for the Sierra glory franchise. Hero 6 was the biggest name born from the fan project big name that sparked the final entry in the series, the 1998 Glory v: Dragon Fire. It was an ambitious Ode from the early 90s, pixel art filled with a Celtic atmosphere and assembled by fans all over the world, and the code scrubed together via two different engines – an adventure game studio and a custom engine called MAD. And of course, it fell apart – but it became a short revival in 2013, not before it passed multiple iterations from 1999 to 2006.

If you know where to look, you can find fragments of Hero 6, but most people who remember it recall that it is simply a project that has become too ambitious for their own good. Scope Creep is a very real factor that kills most projects, and to be particularly talked about for a while, Team Cherry acknowledges that the dramatically expanding scale is part of why Silkson took seven years.

That said, both the heroine quest (available for free!) and the infamous quest appear as a quest for a glorious successor. But, after all, what’s the appeal of both fanmade and “official” vapourware is that of vapourware.

mark:

Edwin: I hope that the craft meta method of presenting entries like one of Jeremy’s fan games, or Mark, writes relatively vague vapourware. Instead, I’m going to sit here and scream in fear. I’m trying to remember the first time I’ve written beyond Good and Evil 2. Space Pirate Sim? It has been developed for at least 17 years and comfortably beats the records that Duke Nukem once held forever. I imagine Edwin, a recent graduate, opens up the words of 2007, and writes about it with the kind innocence of young people. I still see Edwin in the mirror sometimes unknown his face and plump with enthusiastically puffing at school with cool photo mechanics and garruloss pig uncles and a ridiculous spaceship, as well as GameCube games that he played in a winning pint-sized open world.

Ubisoft was surprised to see that it was greenlighted beyond Good & Evil 2. The original is still a great game worth learning – among other things, it is the perfect antidote to fatigue cultivated by Ubisoft’s more recent historical exploration – but it was a commercial failure. After the project has passed approval, it has progressed to stick stubbornly for the best of 20 years, and probably owes a lot to its close relationship with former manager Michelle Anchell and Ubisoft’s big boss Yves Guillemot.

This is a project marked with a smaller INFAMIS. Ubisoft sought a “Unpaid Labor” controversy in 2017 by unveiling fan-created in-game art and music plans. In 2020, Ancel left Ubisoft amid allegations that he was a confused and abusive manager. The extent to which he has contributed over the years is an open question, given that he often appears to be distracted by Rayman Games and his own independent projects at Wild Sheep Studios. There were also tragedy. In 2023, Emile Morell, a creative director and former Rayman legend senior designer, passed away suddenly at the age of 40.

Ubisoft said in 2024 that Good & Evil 2 Beyond 2 is making good progress, but given Ubisoft’s recent financial fate, I am not overly hopeful. They focus on the Rainbow Six, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, which has been rebuilt with support from Tencent and sold quite a bit. If this most late follow-up ever saw daylight, I’m fascinated by reading the internal description of its development, just as I actually play it.

But you, readers-dear-do you bubble up?